Over 90 dead in Syria ‘massacre’
Beirut, May 26A Syrian artillery barrage killed more than 90 persons, including dozens of children, in the worst violence since the start of a UN peace plan to staunch the flow of blood from Syria's uprising, activists said on Saturday.
Protesters at an anti-regime demonstration at Binnish in Idlib, Syria. — AFP

Army-Qaida clash leaves 33 killed in Yemen
Aden, May 26
As many as 33 persons, including six soldiers, were killed today in clashes between the
Al-Qaida and the army in southern Yemen as troops advanced towards the Abyan provincial capital
Zinjibar, military and local sources said.

Rooftop gunman kills 2 in Finland
Helsinki, May 26
An 18-year-old gunman killed two persons and injured seven others in what appeared to be a random shooting in a southern Finnish town, the police said today.
Officers arrested the suspect near Hyvinkaa, some five hours after he fired several shots from a low rooftop at people gathered outside a restaurant just before 2 am (local time yesterday), said Detective Chief Inspector Markku
Tuominen.
A policeman picks up the rifle used by a gunman in Hyvinkaa. — Reuters

Gilani won’t appeal against contempt conviction
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has decided not to appeal his conviction by the Supreme Court on contempt of court charges against the backdrop of National Assembly Speaker’s ruling that the conviction does not disqualify him as a Member of Parliament and to become Prime Minister.

Yousuf Raza Gilani

Putin gives Medvedev reins of ruling partyMoscow, May 26
President Vladimir Putin steered Dmitry Medvedev into the chairmanship of Russia's ruling party on Saturday and demanded reforms to the flagging organisation he will rely on to keep his grip on the country's far-flung regions.

Beirut, May 26
A Syrian artillery barrage killed more than 90 persons, including dozens of children, in the worst violence since the start of a UN peace plan to staunch the flow of blood from Syria's uprising, activists said on Saturday.

The bloodied bodies of children, some with their skulls split open, were shown in footage posted to YouTube purporting to show the victims of the shelling in the central town of Houla on Friday. The sound of wailing filled the room.

The reports of the carnage, which could not be confirmed independently, underlined how far Syria is from any negotiated path out of the 14-month-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius condemned the violence as a "massacre", and said he wanted to arrange a meeting in Paris of the Friends of Syria, a group that brings together Western and Arab countries keen to remove Assad.

Syrian state television aired some of the footage disseminated by activists, saying the massacre was committed by "terrorist" gangs.

It also showed video of bodies with what looked like gunshot wounds to the head, sprawled on bloodstained mattresses.

A British-based opposition group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said residents of Houla were fleeing in fear of more shelling.

It said one person was killed in the northern town of Saraqeb when security forces opened fire on a protest against the killing. Activists distributed footage appearing to show similar protests in Aleppo, the largest city in the north.

A member of the fragmented exile group, which says it speaks for Syria's political opposition, said Assad's forces had killed "entire families" in Houla in addition to the shelling.

"The Syrian National Council (SNC) urges the UN Security Council to call for an emergency meeting ... and to determine the responsibility of the United Nations in the face of such mass killings," SNC spokeswoman Bassma Kodmani said.

Opposition activists said Syrian forces had opened fire with artillery on Friday after skirmishing with insurgents in Houla, a cluster of villages north of the city of Homs, itself battered by shelling.

Although Annan's six-week old ceasefire plan has failed to stop the violence, the United Nations is nearing full deployment of a 300-strong unarmed observer force meant to monitor a truce.

The plan also calls for a truce, withdrawal of troops from cities and dialogue between the government and opposition.

Fabius said "UN observers need to be able to complete their mission and the UN-Arab League's joint special envoy's exit plan has to be implemented immediately". — Reuters

Aden, May 26
As many as 33 persons, including six soldiers, were killed today in clashes between the
Al-Qaida and the army in southern Yemen as troops advanced towards the Abyan provincial capital
Zinjibar, military and local sources said.

Soldiers from the 25th Mechanised Brigade "managed early on Saturday to deal heavy blows to terrorists in Maraqid and Mashqasa ... killing 20 terrorist elements, most of them Somalis," Brigadier General Mohammed
al-Sawmali told defence ministry news website 26sep.net.

"Two soldiers were killed and four others were wounded," 26sep.net quoted him as saying.

Troops "cleansed" Maraqi and
Mashqasa, located on the northeastern outskirts of Zinjibar, and seized machineguns, rockets, and rocket propelled grenades, the same source said.

Meanwhile, at
Jaar, a major Al-Qaida stronghold in Abyan, four soldiers were killed in battles on the town's outskirts, said a military official. — AFP

Tehran, May 26
Iran has said a new report by the UN atomic energy agency on its nuclear activities is "proof" that the programme is peaceful, as analysts played down the agency's discovery of higher-grade uranium traces.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was speaking late yesterday after the report, circulated earlier in the day, revealed that uranium traces of a higher grade than any found before had been detected.

The report, he said, "is more proof of the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear activities and of our country's success in the field of nuclear technology, in particular enrichment, and its full cooperation with the agency".

The report said the traces found at the Fordo site, inside a mountain near Qom, were of uranium enriched to purities of 27 per cent.

Soltanieh gave no direct reaction to the discovery itself.

"The report once again proves to the international community that all Iranian nuclear activities are successfully underway and are uninterrupted, and that there is no diversion in Iran's nuclear material towards military objectives," he said.

Iran has told the IAEA that the Fordo site was enriching only up to 20 per cent, which was already of concern to the watchdog since the capability to do so shortens the theoretical time needed to enrich to weapons-grade uranium of 90 per cent.

Soltanieh's comments come after the P5+1 powers -- the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany -- proposed in a meeting with Iran this week that Iran stop 20 per cent enrichment and a suspension of all activities at Fordo, diplomats said.

The IAEA report said Iran had indicated that the production of nuclear particles "above the target value" may have happened "for technical reasons beyond the operator's control." — AFP

Helsinki, May 26
An 18-year-old gunman killed two persons and injured seven others in what appeared to be a random shooting in a southern Finnish town, the police said today.

Officers arrested the suspect near
Hyvinkaa, some five hours after he fired several shots from a low rooftop at people gathered outside a restaurant just before 2 am (local time yesterday), said Detective Chief Inspector Markku
Tuominen.

The suspect, a local man from Hyvinkaa, 50 km north of the capital, Helsinki, did not resist arrest, Tuominen said.

"The man was found with two weapons, including a hunting rifle," Tuominen said, adding that the police knew of no possible motive pending an investigation.

The gunman killed an 18-year-old woman and an 18-year-old man, as well as critically wounded a 23-year-old female police officer who arrived at the scene soon after the Hyvinkaa police received an alert.

Shootings are not uncommon in Finland where there are 6,50,000 officially recognised gun owners in a population of 5.4 million people, with strong hunting traditions.

In recent years, Finland also has seen two deadly school shootings.

In 2008, a culinary student killed nine fellow students and a teacher before shooting himself at a vocational school in the western town of
Kauhajoki. A year earlier, an 18-year-old killed six fellow students, a nurse and the principal at a high school in
Tuusula, southern Finland. — AP

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has decided not to appeal his conviction by the Supreme Court on contempt of court charges against the backdrop of National Assembly Speaker’s ruling that the conviction does not disqualify him as a Member of Parliament and to become Prime Minister.

Gilani weighed the risk of possible confirmation and an adverse ruling further elaborating the original verdict of 7-member Bench on April 26 and instead preferred to go down in history as the first ever Prime Minister to be convicted.

“He (Gilani) may be a convicted Premier, but the Speaker’s ruling has determined that his conviction does not entail disqualification,” Aitzaz Ahsan, the Premier's lawyer, told reporters in Lahore after filing a statement in the Supreme Court that the premier has opted not to contest his conviction. Ahsan told the advocate on record of the court that he “can go home” as an appeal would not be filed. The decision was taken as the deadline for filing the plea was about to expire.

Ahsan said the decision not to file an appeal was of political nature and taken by the Premier and the PPP leadership who believe that the Speaker’s ruling is final, which has closed any further disqualification proceeding in the Election Commission and that the ruling is final and cannot be challenged. Ahsan, like many other leading jurists, however, says a writ petition can be filed in the high court against the Speaker’s ruling.

Eminent jurist and former law minister SM Zafar said Gilani had committed contempt and brought the judiciary under ridicule according to court’s verdict and had apparently been advised that this judgment has least possibility of reversal in the intra-court appeal before a larger Bench of the Supreme Court.

He said the Speaker had misinterpreted her authority to overrule the court’s unambiguous judgment that he had put it under ridicule which entails disqualification from becoming an MP or the Prime Minister. “He chose a safer course while continuing to cast doubts on whether the court’s judgment means disqualifying him,” Zafar said.

Another leading jurist Salman Raja, who is also counsel for Gilani’s son in drug scam, has expressed surprise that Gilani did not file appeal and accepted to live with the stigma of being a convicted person. He said the Speaker’s ruling can be challenged in either a high court or the Supreme Court.

A report from Karachi said a writ petition against the Speaker’s ruling has already been filed in Sindh High Court.

Ahsan insisted that the Supreme Court’s reference to ridiculing the judiciary was illegal as this charge was not levelled during the contempt case.

Moscow, May 26
President Vladimir Putin steered Dmitry Medvedev into the chairmanship of Russia's ruling party on Saturday and demanded reforms to the flagging organisation he will rely on to keep his grip on the country's far-flung regions.

At Putin's behest, delegates at a United Russia congress elected Medvedev chairman with a unanimous show of hands, the final step in a choreographed role reversal.

After four years of playing No. 2 to his protege - when Putin was Premier and led the party while Medvedev was President - the assertive performance by Putin cemented his return to dominance as a single leader pulling the strings of power. — Reuters